The All Progressives Congress, APC, in Delta State has faulted what it termed the attempted face-saving project monitoring and press conference recently organised by the Managing Director of the Delta State Oil Producing Area Development Commission (DESOPADEC), Chief Askia Ogieh, on Wednesday, October 20, 2021, to showcase his scorecard for the last two years.
The APC noted that the “face-saving project monitoring and press conference” was expected following “revelation and discovery by Deltans that DESOPADEC is spending over N400 million quarterly on Media by the commission’s media contractor, Opa Williams and the MD”.
The party on Friday in a statement signed by Pius Ituru of the Media and Publicity Directorate described the DESOPADEC “as a commission with years of monumental failure and a scam on the oil-producing communities of Delta state.”
The party stated that the press conference was a shabby attempt by the jittery Dr Ifeanyi Okowa led administration to launder an already battered image of the commission that now wallows in the cess-pit of corruption, years of failure in its core objectives and to hoodwink the long-suffering indigenes of the oil-producing communities faced with abandoned and non-existent projects.
The statement went on to stress the fact that oil-producing communities are being criminally shortchanged as the resources of the commission are now presently diverted to fund the development of the university at Owa Alero and other projects concentrated in the governor’s village, hence the need to hurriedly put together the watering press conference in an attempt to paint the impression of the commission meeting its obligations to the oil-producing communities, while the reverse is the case as there are no funds to execute any capital project due to funds diversion.
The APC took umbrage at the deplorable state of affairs of the commission that has now been reduced to a mere salary paying agency, instead of its interventionist mandate for which it was initially created and went on to pooh-pooh the claims by the management of DESOPADEC that it saved N380million from ghost workers as ludicrous when in fact the commission spent millions of naira in conducting a needless staff audit to fish out non-existent ghost workers that were already done by previous administrations of the commission.
“On the inauguration of the present board of the commission, they embarked on a staff audit of supposed ‘ghost workers’ which was sinisterly designed to raise millions of naira for the newly appointed members as the same exercise was duly conducted by the previous board. It was disguised as a staff audit, while in fact, it was actually a conduit pipe to siphon millions of funds of the commission into private pockets.”
The statement wondered why despite the fact that the commission receives billions of naira annually, the commission was unable to have any developmental impact on the lives of the indigenes of oil-producing communities, where numerous dilapidated school buildings litter the environment while hospitals and roads are in deplorable conditions.
The statement further noted that in 2 years, all that the commission has to showcase to Deltans are a handful of cosmetic projects such as the Askia Ogieh Civic Center in Isoko and other insulting projects like fencing, interlocking, painting, hand drilling borehole and others that have no bearing on the socio-economic needs and human capital development of the indigenes of the oil-producing communities who have now lost confidence in the ability and sincerity of the commission to meet its mandate of bringing succour to the ordinary people of these communities.
“We have been raising the alarm about the unholy dealings going on with the statutory allocations of the commission for years now by the Okowa led PDP administration and its ploy to pauperize the indigenes of the oil-producing communities.”
The statement called on the people of Delta State to remain steadfast and resolute to vote out the PDP led government of Dr Ifeanyi Okowa come 2023 for plunging the state into years of monumental infrastructural neglect and economic backwardness.
